jaclaz

Well, for the record there are several freeware bootmanagers capable of hiding partitions (and a few capable of exchanging disks if needed). jaclaz

@JorgeA Nice find about the guy, but you should be aware that he re-invented hot-water (and not particularly hotter than common hot water): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2405855/OFF-Pocket-privacy-pouch-blocks-mobile-phone-signals-stops--including-government--finding-are.html These things are called "Faraday bags", are on the market since years, are not 100% effective in a number of cases, BUT - if they work - they will bring the battery of the phone down in a VERY SHORT period of time. See: http://www.forensicfocus.com/Forums/viewtopic/t=10657/ http://www.forensicfocus.com/Forums/viewtopic/t=9890/ "Inventing" some that already exists, it is actually better tested, and it's already sold for less than US $ 60 (very expensive because of the transparent window, plainer models cost much less, anything between US$ 10 and $25 is available) and selling it for the US$ 85 apiece is pure genius . BTW, wrapping the handy in three or four layers of common kitchen aluminum foil has EXACTLY the same (if not better) results. jaclaz

Oh, yes it can . Whether it will win or not, that's another thing . I find strangely "queer" that someone joins a board only to mention how a specific Commercial tool is "better". Particularly because nothing but a bootable PE of *any kind* (with no added tool of any kind) is needed to reset a Windows password. Needing (or supporting) a 30 Mb+ piece of bloat (payed for - additionally) to do something that can be done with a tool that anyone should have (a suitable bootable PE or the OS install CD/DVD/USB) seems to me like overkill. And I won' t even touch the topic of re-distributing non-redistributable MS files or distributing GNU licensed software (Syslinux/Memdisk) without providing the License nor the source code. And BTW, a minimal PE will have quite a few issues in booting and accessing a largish number of SATA hard disks equipped PC's. Will do, rest assured. jaclaz

Also (JFYI): http://www.prestosoft.com/edp_examdiff.asp jaclaz

OW, comeon. Whenever I find someone who is MS MVP or "Software Architect" I wonder about the whole academic (as they often hold a BSc in Computer Science and similar) and certification business, I may have been particularly unlucky, but I rarely happened to find anyone with those certifications that actually knows where his/her towel is. jaclaz

So, after all, the driver wasn't the "wrong" one. jaclaz

I advise you to provide the example that I requested earlier. jaclaz

No. I mean first disk. As in "Boot device order" (in BIOS) first (internal) disk. If you prefer, it must be disk 0x80 or 128. http://pcsupport.about.com/od/fixtheproblem/ss/bootorderchange.htm More modern BIOSes allow having a number of (internal) hard disks selected in a given order, like HDD-1, HDD-2, etc. jaclaz

Maybe it's time to introduce the idea (for which I will be flamed, I know) that there is a better (faster, more stable, better working) OS than Win98SE (which is not Windows Me) but is 98SE2Me (though it may cause any number of EULA breaking ) : http://www.mdgx.com/ http://www.mdgx.com/98-5.htm#KRM9S jaclaz

You are not really launching the .exe to installl the drivers, aren't you? The rules of thumb with any printer driver ever made by HP are (IMNSHO): never use the .exe extract from it the relevant drivers install normally through the .inf fileThis will normally result in a working printer without unneeded bloat. However you can find here: http://www.treiberupdate.de/treiber-download/download-19121-treiber-HP-HPHewlett-PackardDeskjet970CxiUSBConnection.html the German version of that driver and here the "normal" version of the same: http://www.treiberupdate.de/treiber-download/download-19119-treiber-HP-HPHewlett-PackardDeskjet970Cxi.html by cleverly comparing the contents of the two between them and the differences against the English one already provided, you may be able to modify the English one in such a way that the install "from .exe" works properly (and install besides the actual driver a whole lot of the usual HP bloat). jaclaz

Good. And maybe you missed the fact that the given driver does contain USB related drivers, of course it is very possible that the good guys at HP included them ONLY to confuse matters, but the actual .inf does contain: so, allow me to believe that besides being unneededly rude (a joke is a joke), you are also unfairly accusing me of having provided you a "wrong" driver. jaclaz

Not needing to change disk order and only use the third party bootmanager for those. Better using the available devices. A full install of DOS 6.x or earlier, including any DOS program of some utility ever written and a considerable amount of data created with those programs would top at - say - 300 Mb. If you are really clever and manage to actually have *all* programs EVER written for DOS , this will top at around 600/700 Mb. Quick reality check, when DOS 6.22 came out it was year 1994 AD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_DOS_operating_systems At the time the size of a common hard disk was within first CHS barrier, i.e below around 528 Mb: http://www.pcworld.com/article/127105/article.html http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/1024_cylinder_528_limit.htm likely below 250 or 300 Mb. Of course such images can be mounted on other OS, namely on DOS 7.x and on XP though there may be issues from Windows 9x. jaclaz

Yes and no. Again, DOS NEEDS to start from active primary partition on first disk. If you have three disks of which two contain DOS you need to change the disk order. This can be done by a third party tool or by entering the BIOS and changing disk order (that may or may not be an option in your specific BIOS, and in any case, it is a nuisance). The NTLDR is mainly a OS loader with very little capabilities as bootmanager and cannot exchange disks. You can have DOS 6.22 and DOS 7.x+Win9x on the SAME disk and partition (as this is one of the intended uses of NTLDR and DOS 7.x/Windows 9x has a "special" provision for it) but not on different disks. Among the third party tools, grub4dos (which is NOT GRUB and NOT GRUB2) has some dedicated features aimed to the "DOS/Windows world" among them the possibility to be chainloaded from NTLDR without needing any "install" and it is strongly suggested. But, again, grub4dos has also the possibility to load and run a DOS from a disk image, the suggestion was to have (since you are going over a multi-disk approach): a disk dedicated to DOS 7.x+Windows 9x (containing also the NTLDR+BOOT.INI+NTDETECT.COM)a disk dedicated to Windows XPany number of disk images residing on either of the two other disks (or on a third one) with each image dedicated to a given version of DOSjaclaz

~sigh~ Save us from academics! Wrong you knucklehead, bad analogy because that is NOT what happened historically with clay tablets and stylus instruments. Gutenberg happened, and the printing press, and mass produced literature with efficient, consistent reproduction. If anything, the manual stylus has all but gone away in favor of efficiency and standardization. And about your touchscreens and Windows 8? They will be the blip on the radar, reproducing the old way of finger painting or stylus etching into clay, a solution in search of a problem. Besides, pen input and stylus entry has been with us all throughout the computer age, used in places where it simply made good sense, it didn't just arrive in some new paradigm that you eggheads have discovered. Mark down these two clowns as people to never take seriously. Good comment thread underway though. Even the fanboys question these two geniuses! Charlotte, you have it wrong . The keyboard is an INPUT method, not an OUTPUT one. Gutemberg and printing is a reproducing method (in several copies) of something that has been INPUT. If you have ever seen a Linotype (which is what took printing to a new stage in 19th century): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotype_machine you would know how it has a keyboard as INPUT method. I have used extensively (and still use) stylus input devices, and I find the method perfectly adequate (and BTW much more handy than a "virtual On-Screen-Keyboard). For a simple language such as English where there are no accents or diacritical characters a "plain" touchscreen OSK may do, but on most other languages it is a big PITA or you start writing grammatically incorrect, not entirely unlike SMS bastardized the languages. I have the fortune (or ability ) to possess a very "clear" handwriting, and - just as an example - my good ol' Sony P900i character recognition capabilities are enough to allow me "fluid" writing (and recognition) with only a very little percentage of mistakes/backspaces needed. To me stylus input is a very valid alternative to the keyboard. Of course, in the case of a touchscreen device it only makes sense if you hold the device in your hands, on a desktop one would need a graphic tablet or something similar. BUT again, it can be an option. In any case even the ancient peoples that used clay tablets used a stylus on them and NOT their fingers. Even monkeys learn to use a stick to get ants: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_animals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_animals#Chimpanzees Painting with fingers is what is taught/used pre-school, it is not "natural" anymore to anyone that has actually gone to school and used for several years stylus or pens or brushes for hand writing and drawing and painting. As a matter of fact, I personally find a graphic tablet and pen the "natural" interface for a PC, much more precise, accurate and fast than the mouse, not only inside graphic programs. jaclaz

It depends of what you want to do. A "report" sheet made using vlookup and similar functions is "dynamic" and "connected" to the source worksheet(s). Any change in the source will be "reflected" on the "report" sheet, you can have as many "report" sheets as you want, each one highlighting some fields or having fields in a given order, sorting them, etc. In this case you would be using Excel as a "poor man's" database, where you have one or more sheets (separated or connected among them) containing "raw data" and one or more "report" sheets allowing to sort/visualize the data in any given form. The use of consolidating functions built-in in Excel is a (very limited) subset of what you can do "manually". jaclaz

I know that it is installed by default in 9x. I was asking if it can be installed on a separate partition (multiboot with 9x). So can you have this sort of setup: Disk 1: DOS 7.x Disk 2: Windows 98SE (which includes 7.x) Disk 3: Windows XP DOS needs to start from First Active Primary partition of First disk. You need to change disk order in BIOS (or use a tool like grub4dos and change disk order with it). But to run *only* DOS, if you plan to use grub4dos anyway, having it in an image makes a lot of sense. jaclaz

Well, that file contains a directory enu\9x\disk1\win98usb\ . Not having a stupid HP deskjet 970 cxi it was a rather educated guess that it does contain the USB driver as well. Possibly (I would dare to state "most probably") you were incapable of installing that driver properly (or you have a modified system and that driver is incompatible, HP drivers are reknown for being troublesome). In any case I can see how vast is the gratitude that you express for the time I wasted trying to help you. I am overwhelmed by it, and I won't feel like attempting to help you anymore (that amount was more than enough). jaclaz

I guess that the HP deskjet 970cxi is non-resilient printer. The driver should be : http://www.filewatcher.com/m/dj975en.exe.3500157-0.html jaclaz

Rule of the thumb. Don't expect anything higher than 30/40 Mb/s on USB 2.0. Anything faster is USB 3.0. Of course the "estimated transfer speed" is "estimated", however. jaclaz

Define "resilient", please. @Everyone, please note how the OP asked this question on April and never replied, and -as highlighted by dencorso on post #6 - darreljon is particularly fond of this question, that he repeats from time to time, as he plainly stated on post #16: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/162657-why-use-win-9x-on-new-pcs-in-2013/#entry1037374 Why not waiting for his re-posting expected for September 2015? jaclaz

Not really, really. (please read as NO! ) A BIOS is a Basic Input Output System. Basically at boot time it gathers some info from the hardware and stores this info in a given format and provides to the OS loader a set of interfaces to these data. BIOS and EFI/UEFI do not share the same data format let alone the same way to access those. Most EFI/UEFI have still a setting to "behave as BIOS" (or if you prefer a number of EFI/UEFI motherboards have also a BIOS). A "normal" XP expects a BIOS. There are ways (reFind, bootcamp, reFit or similar) to boot XP on a EFI/UEFI motherboard, basically the bootmanager replaces the BIOS and provides to the OS loader the "right" data: http://refit.sourceforge.net/myths/ And we already had (almost) this same conversation. http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/163378-xpx86-win7x64-uefi-dual-boot-on-ssd/ Of course you are perfectly free to believe that EFI/UEFI is OS independent . jaclaz

I only posted how a valid path should be made. , which doesn't necessarily mean that a backslash is needed specifically there . Now, if congnt92 would have spent some time searching instead of posting AND bumping, he might have found these examples/tutorials: http://gosh.msfn.org/replacesource.htm http://reboot.pro/topic/4528-how-to-make-your-favorite-theme-for-xp/ (no, the backslash is not needed there) jaclaz

Well, open a command prompt and run in it: SET windir[ENTER] If what you get back has a backslash at the end, then you should NOT add it, if there isn't you NEED to add it to make it a valid path. jaclaz

An image of an "average" drive (I actually presume you are meaaning "disk", but when it comes to this compression topic this disambiguation is irrelevant) is ACTUALLY made mostly of 00's. A "filled-up-to-the-brim" disk (or partition/drive) image is obviously not compressible as much. A 3/4 empty (disk or drive) image will be actually made for 3/4 of 00's. So, if your 47 Gb image compresses in around 4Gb, very likely it contains between 8 and 16 Gb of (not-compressed) files (i.e. once taken the 00's out of the equation, as they will compress in Kb's, not Gb's, you have a compression ratio between 50% and 75%). jaclaz

Try making a largish file filled with 00's. Then compress it (still with the same 7-zip). Astounding how much it can be compressed, isn't it? Three rules of thumb: compression ratio depends on contents of the UNcompressed source compression ratio depends on how "homogenuous" is the UNcompressed source each compression tool may have particularly efficient algorithm for a specific file format of the sourceA "generic use" tool tend to be more or less "symmetric" in computing time, i.e. it must compress in "reasonable" time and be able to uncompress still in a "reasonable" time. As a general rule, the more you compress something, the more it takes (and the more it takes to uncompress it). In theory highly asymmetric compression algorithms can be devised that take ages (hours/days) to compress a source, needing extremely powerful machine/plenty of resources and that can yet be uncompressed in a "reasonable" time on an average machine. As an example the KGB archiver had (among MANY senseless FUD spread about it) a period of notoriousness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KGB_Archiver http://sourceforge.net/projects/kgbarchiver/ (current results are however better than that) And - as a side note - this is the reason why compression tests are usually done on a given set of known files: http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/files/ this may produce - if the archiver developer is trying to cheat - lead to tools written and optimized explicitly for a given set of files. THe factors involved in a compression tool, on th esame fileset are three: compression time compression ratio uncompression time to which everyone can give an appropriate "weight", resulting in "efficiency", the formula used in the mentioned site: is a good way to judge generic compressors. To make a practical example, if I had to chose: http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/summary_mf.php i would use nanozip and have 74.4% of compression ratio, compress 316 Mb in 24.1 s, uncompress in 14.1 or FreeArc, rather than having PAQ8 breaking the 80% compression ratio "wall", but doing so in several tens thousands of seconds, both in compressing and uncompressing. A good example of a very well compressible source file is a log, see: http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/log.php around 98 % is achieved by many compressors. A good example of "difficult" to compress file is JPEG (which is already compressed): http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/jpg.php but here PAQ8 takes a revenge, even over a specific-for-jpg compressor such as PackJPG jaclaz